Artists’ Travel as a Tool for Professional Growth and Development

For experts working in the arts sector, I believe travel is a crucial form of professional development. Prior to working at McKnight, at the Jerome Foundation I saw the massive impacts of artist travel and study grants. In the McKnight Artist Fellowships, we have long included funding to bring in artist residents to Minnesota from around the country and around the world, all with a goal to teach, inspire, and cross-pollinate artists’ crafts and perspectives.

Importantly, it’s not just travel that’s at stake here. The writer Oscar Wilde once said, “It is only by contact with the art of foreign nations that the art of a country gains that individual and separate life that we call nationality.” Likewise, learning from people and communities outside Minnesota can represent an extremely strategic use of state resources. In unique and powerful ways, individual travel experiences can help define our state’s cultural identity while bolstering a healthy arts sector’s professional networks and careers.

Now that’s a trip worth taking.